


The Promise of a Better Place

by VeteranKlaus



Series: Become Human [7]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detroit: Become Human Fusion, Alternate Universe - Future, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, and the lengths they have to go to to find safety, etc - Freeform, references to how androids are treated/seen, references to past violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:29:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27124538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeteranKlaus/pseuds/VeteranKlaus
Summary: Vanya never saw her life being like this, honestly, but she can’t give up now. She helps people. She saves people. And she’ll keep doing that as long as she can.###In which Vanya, living a peaceful life on a farm by herself, finds herself helping androids to find a safer life elsewhere. When a pair shows up at her door, she knows she'll do whatever she can to help them as well.
Series: Become Human [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1972444
Comments: 13
Kudos: 65





	The Promise of a Better Place

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in the Detroit: Become Human universe, but no knowledge of that is needed to read this: just know that it’s set in late 2030’s and androids look and act like humans, are very common in every household and in public, and are become self aware and want to be treated equally.

Vanya wakes to the sound of birds chirping outside of her window. A minute later, her alarm goes off, and she hits it until it turns off. She longs for a while to just laze in the cosy confines of her bed, dreading the idea of getting out. The floor will be cold beneath her feet, and there will probably be a draft, and it’ll be  _ horrible.  _ But right now, her bed is so warm, the blankets around her so inviting. 

But she has important things to do today, and she can’t afford to stay in bed.

With a sigh, she slips out of bed and into her bathroom; she showers, changes, and dries her hair before throwing it into a ponytail, and then she leaves. She brews a pot of coffee in her kitchen and puts a couple of pieces of bread in her toaster, and then she slips over to her computer. 

Her security system hasn’t picked anything up during the night, and there’s nothing coming to her now. She breathes out a sigh of relief, returns to her coffee and toast and thinks about what she’ll have to do today. She needs to check on the chickens, and check the tomato plants in her greenhouse, and all the other plants growing inside. A look in her refrigerator tells her that she ought to think about going out for groceries soon, but she’ll have to make do for a little while longer. She can’t risk leaving her house just yet.

When her breakfast is done, and her security system still hasn’t picked anything up, Vanya makes her way to her basement.

“Just me,” she calls, and she pulls back the curtain hanging up at the end of the hallway and slips past it, a smile on her face. “I hope you were okay last night.”

The two deviants look up at her entrance, and relief slips onto their faces; their shoulders relax. 

“We were just fine,” says Amy. “No one came by?”

“Totally fine,” says Vanya, and she sips at her coffee. Just as she does, the phone in her pocket vibrates with a message, and when she sees who it’s from, her smile widens. She looks at the two deviant androids in front of her and says, “better than fine. Mark says we should be able to move today.”

Their eyes widen, jaws falling a little slack, and she can’t help but grin at them. They’ve been waiting here for nearly two weeks, after all. It can’t have been easy for them, but they’ve been patient and understanding, and hopefully, that will all pay off.

“Today?” echoes Thomas.

“Today.”

### 

They have to wait a little longer, because it will be easier to move them overnight, and they need to make sure that there’s no one following them, or suspecting them of anything. Police patrols are common this close to the border, to stop people doing exactly what Vanya is doing, but she’s avoided getting caught out by them so far and she isn’t going to get caught out now. 

But when day turns to night and there’s no sign of a patrol out tonight, Mark, an old friend of hers, comes by in his truck. There’s no more preparation they can do.

The androids don’t have their LEDs, their appearances don’t match what they looked like before; Mark got them passports. Their injuries have been healed, and there’s nothing more they can do for the couple.

It’s tricky business, getting androids out of the country, but she’s been doing it for two years now. She doesn’t plan to stop, and she doesn’t plan to fail.

She already failed once before. 

She tries not to think about how this all started much, but when she fears the idea of getting caught, when she toys with the idea of shutting this operation down, she remembers the first android that came to her.

It was purely accidental. Vanya didn’t have any androids of her own, nor had she ever, and she didn’t really care much for them either. She had her little farm that she had worked hard to get, and it was peaceful, and things were good. When the first patrol came to her house, having to check her house in case she was hiding androids, she was shocked. She hadn’t even thought of anyone doing such a thing, let alone herself.

And then an android showed up on her doorstep in the middle of winter. His name had been Andrew, and he was the first deviant she ever met. He was injured, and he was scared, and he just wanted help. Vanya couldn’t turn him away, so she let him hide in her house, and he taught her more about androids and deviants than ever.

And then he wanted to leave the country. She understood that, of course. Androids were controversial, and different places had different reactions to them, different rules, different approaches; but they would be safer, there. They wouldn’t be able to be tracked down and scrapped. They could blend in easier, and no one would suspect them of being anything other than human, and they could live. They could actually live.

All Andrew had ever wanted was to be safe and to have his own life. Vanya tried to help.

They shot him in the airport.

She’s gotten better at it since then. She’s gotten better with the police patrols, with hiding androids; with helping them. She can treat damages better, and now, she has more help as well. It’s not just her trying to help the deviants, and with multiple people on the job, it’s almost always successful nowadays. She helps androids hide, helps them get better, and helps them get to somewhere safer for them. She doesn’t hear from them once they part ways - it’s safer that way for the both of them - but she keeps an eye out, and she doesn’t catch wind of them getting caught in the end. 

Amy and Thomas go with Mark, who takes them to the airport, and she waits for hours until Mark tells her that they got through. There’s security in place to keep androids from sneaking through, of course, and it’s easy enough to detect them with temperature checks - 

But it’s easy enough to get through them, too, when the person giving the temperature checks sympathises with them and lets them through. She knows one person who works there willing to work with her, and sometimes it can be a slow process, trying to get the androids to the airport to fit Anna’s schedule, but it’s the safest way to do it. There might be other people willing to let the androids slip by, but it’s a gamble they can’t afford to take.

Vanya never saw her life being like this, honestly, but she can’t give up now. She helps people. She saves people. And she’ll keep doing that as long as she can.

Sometimes androids find her themselves, and sometimes they hear about her and seek her out. She’s aware that there are plenty of deviants around, hiding amongst themselves or blending in with humans, and some of them are working together to try to get something better for themselves - for all androids - whether that’s here or elsewhere - and she guesses that somewhere along the line, her name got into that circle of androids and deviants as someone they could trust, and that’s good enough for her. If an android shows up because they heard about her, or just because they found her house and need help; she’ll give it to them. That’s how her life goes for a while.

She keeps her farm going, and it’s an easy, peaceful life out here. Sometimes androids show up in groups or pairs or by themselves. If they’re hurt, she helps repair them - she’s been learning with time how to repair an android, and she’s gotten good at it now. Mark helps get the androids from her house to the airport, and sometimes he comes by with resources; thirium, biocomponents, anything she might need for the injured androids. They stay with her for however long they have to, and then they leave, and they don’t get caught, and she goes back to tending to her farm.

She doesn’t really have plans for this. She never planned for this to happen, and she doesn’t know where it’s going; when it’ll stop. She doesn’t mind, though. She’ll keep doing this until she doesn’t have to, and she fears that might take longer than it should, but she’s nothing if not determined. She’ll do it until she doesn’t have to, or until she gets caught, and she doesn’t have any plans for the latter.

However, life always likes to surprise her.

The alarms go off at one in the morning.

With the help of her friend, she had set up some security systems around her property and nearby to alert her to any incoming police patrols, and it gave her just under ten minutes to hide any traces of androids around her house and any androids themselves. 

At the sound, despite being half-asleep, she jumps out of bed and stumbles down her stairs, immediately going to her storeroom to start hiding the thirium and android biocomponents she has. There are no androids hiding with her at the moment, and she isn’t afraid of getting caught this time; she knows how to hide everything and how to slip under the radar. 

The knock at the door comes faster than she expected, however. She only just has time to grab a cardigan to cover herself with before opening it, and in front of her is certainly no officer, but instead a scared looking blonde woman with a distressed child. 

“Please,” she says, looking at Vanya with wild eyes. “Help us.”

“Shit,” Vanya says, looking over their shoulders. She can see the too-close flashing of blue and red lights. Hurriedly, she ushers both people into her house, closing and locking the door behind her, and then she ushers them towards her basement. The woman doesn’t question what she’s doing, but as soon as they’re in the basement, she kneels down and tries to comfort the child with her. Vanya pulls the curtain across room, hiding them from view, and slips back out of the basement. She has just enough time to catch her breath before there’s another knock at the door, and still she takes a moment to compose herself.

Despite the way her heart still races beneath her ribcage, she tries to keep herself calm when the officer, one she hasn’t seen come around here before, invites himself into her house, absently responding to her attempts at small talk as he looks around. She can’t help but feel a little smug whenever he walks right past some of her hiding places, none the wiser. 

“Can’t be too careful,” he says, peering into her storeroom. “Deviant took a child hostage with it. Poor kid’s probably terrified.”

“Oh?” Vanya says, carefully indifferent, and she picks at her nails. “Well, I hope you find them soon.”

“Mmm.” The man glances at her for a while. “Just you here?”

“Just me,” she says. “No androids of my own, either.”

“So nothing upstairs?” He asks, waving a hand to the stairs that lead only to her bedroom, a second bathroom, and a smaller, unused bedroom. 

“Not at all,” she says, and smiles at him.

He checks nonetheless, of course, and she lingers by the front door as he does, hoping it might urge him to leave quicker, but he lingers just as much, as if he just knows something is wrong, as if he’s waiting for something to happen.

It works.

There’s a thud downstairs, a yell, and then urgent hushing. The officer shares a look with Vanya, unimpressed and perhaps a little smug, and then he heads to the door. Vanya can’t think of any excuse quick enough, and when she tries to dart in front of the officer, blocking his path to the door leading down to the basement, he just shoves her aside and opens the door.

He thuds down the stairs with Vanya right behind him, blood roaring in her ears. It’s useless, though. The android is still talking, the kid still distressed, and the officer knows they’re there, and he’ll recognise them. 

“Please,” Vanya says. “They didn’t do anything wrong-”

The officer doesn’t pay any mind to her other than to glare at her when she reaches for his arm. His hand curls into the curtain hanging from a bar along the room, and he throws it aside, and there is the android and the kid. 

“Please,” the android says, echoing Vanya, and she positions herself in front of the kid immediately, standing up. Vanya dashes to her side, a little in front. “Please, we didn’t do anything-”

It doesn’t matter, though. Because she’s still a deviant, and he doesn’t care, and he has a hand slipping around his waist to the handle of his gun, and Vanya thinks of Andrew and the sound his body made when it hit the ground.

She might not be strong, but the officer doesn’t expect her to jump and shove him with all her weight. He stumbles, and, thankfully, the android takes the hint - or perhaps she even saw it coming - because she coaxes the kid onto his feet and encourages him to follow her up the stairs. Vanya runs after them, not wasting a second, and at the top of the stairs she slams the door shut behind herself, trying to buy them as much time as she can.

It’d be easy for her to have just let the officer take them, she knows. She doesn’t even know either of their names, or why they turned up at her door with the police so close behind them. But she also saw the look on the android’s face when she opened the door, the way she stepped in front of him when the police officer came down, the way she tries her best to comfort him now while they keep running. She can’t let them just be taken away. 

She looks back at Vanya with wide eyes. “Where are we going? She asks as they stumble down her porch, and Vanya looks around wildly before her eyes fall on the only real place they can go.

She points at her car, and as the officer bursts out of her house, they rush to the car and jump in. The car struggles to keep up with her demands as she starts it manually and forces it to speed out of her driveway and onto the uneven road leading up to her house, but it takes them away, and the officer doesn’t catch up with them. 

She doesn’t stop, though; not until she feels like she can breathe again, and the android stops peering over her shoulder to look out the window, instead focusing on the child with her; trying to calm and soothe him as best as she can after such a stressful situation. 

“Can we - is it safe to stop?” asks the android, meeting her gaze in the car’s mirror. “Just for a minute, please-”

“It should be,” Vanya says. She knows the roads around here, and she’s stuck to the quieter ones, and so far out from any city or village, it’ll be harder to track her car. They’ll have to keep moving, but they have enough time to gather themselves. 

She comes to a stop, takes a moment to compose herself and think about what just happened. She won’t be able to go back home - not any time soon. She’ll need to find somewhere for all of them to hide. 

She glances back to the android and the child, both quieter now, neither paying any attention to her, and then she turns the radio on quietly and slumps in her chair as gentle classical music drifts out of the speakers in the vehicle.

After several minutes, the android murmurs, “thank you.”

Vanya smiles, tense, and turns to look back at them in the backseat together. It will be hard to get out of this situation, but something tells her that she didn’t make the wrong decision. She wouldn’t take it back, and she doesn’t regret it.

“What are your names?” She asks. The android looks at the child, watching him with a gentle, fond expression on her face.

“His name is Harlan,” she murmurs. Her eyes bounce back up to Vanya, and she offers out a hand. “My name’s Sissy.”

She takes her hand and doesn’t look away as she says, “I’m Vanya. Nice to meet you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading; if you liked this, let me know with a kudos or a comment! 
> 
> I planned to write these oneshots for each Hargreeves' kid in this universe, and I've made up some roles for other characters (such as Lila, Dave, Raymond) but their plots would interact a lot with the other characters and would probably lead to more than a oneshot, and those characters would interact with more characters - so it's a Situation. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them!


End file.
